The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  Harris could be strikingly inefficient when pressed against his will. But driven now by pique and a morbid desire to humor Jensen until the young officer screwed himself through the folly of his own arrogance, the pilot donned his headset and applied himself to the navigation console.

  The probe launched with a minimum of kick. No trail showed on the monitors. Satisfied only momentarily, Jensen hastened off the bridge to don his uniform before his coveted data started to arrive.

  Harris bided the interval by plucking loose threads from the cuff of his coveralls. Upon Jensen’s return, he had fallen asleep in his headset, his large hands loose in his lap, and his mouth open with snoring.

  The Shearborn’s officer in command spared no attention for annoyance. Tracking monitors showed the relay probe carving a wide parabola around Cassix star. The moment the light flashed green on the signal board, Jensen reached without ceremony and stripped the headset from his pilot. Harris woke with his customary hair-trigger reflexes and banged his head on the bulkhead as he rocketed out of his chair.

  “Damn you,” he growled at Jensen.

  Finding his fanatical commander absorbed by the new transmission, Harris stalked off to the galley.

  He came back after an interval, munching a dessert bar. Jensen had already assembled details enough to confirm MacKenzie James’s assessment. Harris stopped chewing as his senior recited the facts.

  Trouble had found opening because the fleet which normally patrolled Cassix had been pared down to one ship, in support of the offensive at Dead Star. That cruiser had fallen to skip-runners who by long-range design had kidnapped the director of research’s two infant daughters from an earlier raid on a passenger vessel.

  “A straight-forward case,” Jensen reported, “except for their bent for terrorism. The bastards killed the director’s wife to prove themselves capable. The two little girls they hold hostage will be spared, provided the staff at Cassix surrenders a working prototype of the new laser weapons system.”

  Harris stood for a moment, crumbs from his snack falling unnoticed down his chin. For once his blue eyes were direct. “Who hired the talent for this? Indies? Junk freighters equipped with that scale of armament could make for a very ugly mess.”

  “Indies, or rebels, or some independent faction who buys through skip-runners, does it matter?” Jensen yanked off the headset, then reflexively smoothed his hair. “I want data on that station as quickly as you can manage.”

  Harris sank mechanically in his crew chair. He shoved his last bite of cookie in his mouth by reflex, while the headset between his hands repeated in precise and ugly detail just what would happen to the director’s little daughters if the terms of their kidnappers were not met. He swallowed with difficulty, for his mouth had gone dry. “I can’t,” he said finally. “The specs on Cassix Station are one hundred percent classified.”

  “But you flew test runs there,” Jensen argued. Mac James had offered him a challenge he intended to win, and as a Fleet officer his duty was explicitly clear. “Reconstruct what you can from memory. The skip-runners intend to exchange the children for the weapons system by cargo cable at 2000 hours, which leaves us very little margin to prepare.”

  Harris looked up sharply. “Cargo cable? We have a chance, then. Security might be recovered, but only if we write off the lives of two kids.”

  “Just carry on!” Jensen added no promises. Ruthless as his choice seemed, in this case Harris knew the young officer was not playing for heroics. If the weapons system currently in development at Cassix fell into Indie hands, far more than two little girls would suffer.

  The Shearborn prepared for intervention. Jensen activated the cloaking devices and ran checks on shields and weapons. Harris applied himself to navigation and mapped a course calculated to conceal their approach behind the mass of Cassix’s star until the last possible moment. Neither man spoke. Harris held singlemindedly to duty for reasons of conscience; Jensen’s penchant for advancement promised that his record in a crisis must be impeccable.

  Presently, the Shearborn hurtled on a meticulously arranged course around Cassix’s star. At the precise instant she crossed into scanner range, Harris kicked the attitude thrusters, killed her drives, and made a face as the snack in his stomach danced flip-flops to the pull of inertia. Tumbling with the random majesty of an uncaptured asteroid, the scout craft he piloted went dead to observation.

  “Nice work,” said Jensen. Awkwardly stiff in his command chair, he smiled. Their timing was perfect, a clean thirty minutes before the scheduled exchange between skip-runners and station. As the scopes resolved data, the lieutenant leaned anxiously forward. He expected the spider-armed sprawl of an orbital station, gravity powered and glittering with the lights of habitation.

  What he saw was deep-space darkness, scattered with distant stars.

  His blank-faced dismay raised laughter from Harris. “Well, what do you want for a security installation? Billboard lights and a docking beacon?”

  Jensen shut his eyes, opened them, and tried not to blush at his foolishness. Like the chaser he commanded, Cassix Station would be surfaced in camouflage. The complex would be dark except for lighted pinpricks that simulated stars. Her deep-space side would be painted in reflective, and unless a ship chanced to cross her orbital plane and catch her in occultation with her parent star, she would be invisible to passing traffic.

  Jensen bridled rising annoyance. He dared not use the Shearborn’s fancy surveillance equipment. Without knowing how sophisticated his adversary’s gear might, be, he must assume that deflection beam interference would warn an already wary skip-runner that his activities had drawn Fleet notice. There were other ways to locate an orbiting body. The simplest involved time-sequence imaging, then a comparison of star fields to determine which objects were artificial by drift, except time was the one most glaring commodity this blitz operation lacked.

  “There,” Harris said suddenly, startlingly loud in the silence. “I’ve got a fix on the target.”

  His experienced eyes had spotted the skip-runner craft. A flat flash of reflection confirmed his sighting as a shiny surface on her hull caught reflection from the dwarf star. Jensen turned up the resolution enhancer on the analog screen. Though his pilot patiently informed him that the hardware would not perform under Shearborn’s erratically violent motion, the lieutenant continued searching until his eyes burned.

  Hope of coherent conversation seemed nonexistent; Harris shrugged and made a show of initiating a star-field comparison search. Lights flickered on the control panels as computer circuitry normally reserved for navigation diverted to speed his results. The pilot laced blunt hands in his lap. Wearing the cynical expression he practiced for women who pressed him for marriage, he stretched back in his crew chair, adjusted his headset, and wished he could watch a porn tape. Sex was a better sweat than listening to the terse exchange between a desperate parent and an equally nervous skip-runner who doubtlessly wondered whether any Indie contract was worth taking risks of this magnitude.

  Suddenly Harris shot upright, the mockery gone from his face. “Sir, your plan won’t work.”

  Jensen held his focus on the analog screens, where, faint against the deep of space, a spider-filament of cable arced out, then ever so gradually drew taut.

  “They’re sending the babies down linked to a timed explosive,” Harris continued vehemently.

  This time Jensen answered, very bleak. “Linked? How? To the carrier capsule, or the cable itself?”

  Harris listened. “Cable,” he replied after a moment. “The detonation code will be kept by the skip-runner. Which means the scum will skip system, leaving station personnel fifty-five seconds to reel that capsule in and cut those kids free before the charge goes off.”

  Jensen became very still.

  Harris showed a rare mix of deference and regret. “I’m afraid we’re shut down, sir. Best we can do
is record data that might help an undercover agent round them up.”

  “Which will be impossible to manage, not before the Indies have replicated that laser design.” All nerves and anger, Jensen flexed the fingers of his right hand. “I’ll shoot out the cable link between the explosive and that capsule first.”

  Harris grinned, sarcasm restored. “Boy, we’re in problems up to our nuts already. Brass won’t award a winning ticket for blowing two babies to bits. You’d have to be marksman elite to maybe hit that cable at all, far less the connecting link between a carry capsule and an explosive charge.”

  Jensen returned a nasty smile, then drew a chain from his collar. He dangled before his pilot’s insolent gaze a medallion of skill that not one man in ten thousand held the privilege to wear.

  “Shit,” said Harris. “How was I to guess?”

  “You couldn’t,” Jensen shot back. He was the youngest, by nearly a decade, ever to obtain the premier marksman’s rating, but this once pride did not prompt his temper. The mission chronometer by his elbow advanced another fraction. A margin of minutes remained if the Shearborn was to foil the kidnappers.

  The problems ahead were formidable, as Harris was quick to point out. “You can’t hit that small a target without an attitude adjustment. Shearborn’s still tumbling, remember?” The pilot slashed a finger beneath his chin in graphic pantomime. “We break cover, and the little girls die. We’re shot down the second we fire our gravity drives.”

  Jensen made contingency for that. “We wait,” he said, an intensity about him that Harris had never seen. “After station personnel cable the plans up to the terrorists, the kids start down in the capsule. We stabilize our attitude then. Surprise will be in our favor. I shoot out the linkup. The kids and the charge are in free-fall but recoiling away from the break in the line. Station personnel will reel the babies in, bet on that. And with an enabled charge drifting back toward its point of origin, the skip-runners will have their hands full cutting loose that trailing cable. That gives maybe ten seconds for us to blast their ugly presence out of space.”

  “Clever.” Harris scratched his chest in that thoughtful manner his drinking cronies would have recognized for a warning. “But your range is extreme. You haven’t allowed for drift, or for the proximity of Cassix’s star. Gravity will pull your shot off target.”

  Jensen reached out, gently smoothed the Wing insignia on his pilot’s coveralls. “That’s where your part comes. You’ll plot my aiming point. If my shot were treated as an exercise in drive ballistics, you and that computer would have no trouble getting it right.”

  Harris felt sweat spring beneath his collar. The accuracy required would likely be past the limits of the technology. Though the more brilliant pilots did such things in the course of test-flight emergencies, this was another matter. A man had no business risking the lives of two little girls to instinct, the reflexive style of hunch which routinely carried a badly drawn design through without mishap. Harris had no grounds but his wilder nature was piqued. Here was a daredevil stunt like no other; if he pulled it off there would be accolades.

  Harris set steady hands to the keyboard. “Give me the specs on your pellet rifle, and may the god of foolish ventures smile on us both.”

  Jensen grinned for the first time since the start of the operation. Whatever queer challenge Mackenzie James had handed the crew of the Fleet chaser Shearborn, one of his skip-running brethren was about to get hammered out of space.

  * * *

  The inner lining of the pressure suit wicked away the sweat from Jensen’s skin. Doused alternately in shadow, then the burnished, bloody glare of Cassix’s star, he belted himself into the service niche by the forward air lock. The state-of-the-art gauss rifle cradled on his arm hindered his movements very little. The Shearborn tumbled dizzily underneath him. Yet in null gravity, as long as Jensen did not fix on the scenery, the radical attitude of the hull did not disorient him. Any nerves and tension he suffered stemmed from the unrevealed motives of Mackenzie James. That point preoccupied the lieutenant to the exclusion of all else. The children and the laser prototypes Jensen currently jeopardized his career to save had become prizes in a ritualized duel of wits.

  Jensen checked the time. The suit chronometer read 2012. By now, the crate with the laser prototype lay in skip-runner hands. During the ascent, the speed of the cable’s drive motor had been measured and recorded into Harris’s aft right computer. The lieutenant braced his rifle ... and waited.

  In the darkness beyond Cassix, the lift motor hummed and reversed. Cable turned through frictionless gears, and a capsule bearing two children and an attached packet of condensed explosive began the kilometer-long transit toward the waiting arms of the father. Harris finalized his calculations.

  The chronometer read 2026. A buzzer trilled in Jensen’s helmet, and the pilot’s voice read off coordinates.

  Precisely on signal, the Shearborn’s gravity drives kicked over. Centrifugal force slammed the lieutenant against his belt restraints; stars spun like a pinwheel around him as the Shearborn’s attitude corrected with vicious and vengeful precision, compliments of pilot Harris in sharpest form.

  The scout craft stabilized.

  The parting kick of inertia was punishingly severe. Jensen’s helmet struck the hull with a clang that made his ears ring. His head spun sickeningly, and, he cursed. If his vertigo did not stabilize fast, he would be unable to orient and take aim. Obstinacy born of exhaustive practice allowed him to slot the rifle stock into the connector which linked to the suit’s visual display. At a second signal, he switched on the targeting scope.

  On the Shearborn’s bridge, the monitors would be screaming, one led alleyway of warning lights as the skip-runner ship trained weapons on the chaser which dared an intervention. Both ships had their screens down. On Cassix Station, speakers blared as personnel shouted in dismay ... too late. The integrity of the exchange they had promised the skip-runner was disrupted now past mending. No last-minute plea would convince a ruthless band of criminals that this rescue had not been betrayal. A father wept while a skip-runner’s mate with shaking hands stabbed the detonation-codes into a keypad. All men waited—one of them grim and another in tearful anguish. In under sixty seconds the silvery capsule on the cargo cable would explode in a coruscation of light.

  Jensen raised his gauss rifle in the absolute silence of vacuum. With a clear head he locked the targeting scope onto coordinates, then cool-handedly squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle kicked. Very far off, tiny to insignificance, a pinpoint of light crawled along a fragile thread of cable. The pellet which raced to intercept sped unhindered through vacuum, its course bent gently by the pull of a red dwarf star.

  Sweating freely now, Jensen counted seconds—five, six—the marking tone sounded a final time. The lieutenant gripped hard to the combing. The reflective markers on the cable glistened like dewdrops poised on spider silk. By now, the magnetized pellet should have cut through. Jensen felt an ache in his chest. Along with the possibility of defeat, he realized at some point that he had stopped breathing.

  Then the cable parted. Jensen shouted in relief as the tiny fleck that was the children’s capsule drifted in a graceful arc against the stars.

  A flash answered almost immediately, as the skip-runner ship fired gravity engines. The technician in her hold abandoned his keypad. Cursing and furious, he wrestled into a pressure suit, desperate to free the locking clamp that secured the trailing cable that now rebounded treacherously under recoil. Jensen’s marksmanship had brought havoc, for now the fully enabled plasma charge drifted straight for the kidnapper’s cargo bay.

  “Now, Harris, now,” shouted Jensen.

  His helmet went black. Reflex shielding protected his vision as Harris manned the weaponry, and both of the Shearborn’s cannons opened fire.

  The helmet’s shielding stayed opaque for a long and maddening interv
al. Jensen fidgeted like a child, cursed like a dock worker. His visor cleared finally to reveal a spreading, glowing curtain of debris that had once been a skip-runner ship. The moment warmed like vintage wine. Jensen smiled. He stroked his rifle like the thigh of a naked woman and said softly, very softly, “Up yours, MacKenzie James.”

  * * *

  Jensen tugged the sleeve of his dress whites from the grasp of yet another congratulatory technician. The lieutenant had received a hero’s welcome the moment the Shearborn touched the dock. Every member of Cassix Station personnel had come forward. They had shaken his hand, thanked him, and insisted upon an impromptu reception to meet the key administrators.

  “Just coincidence we happened into this sector at all,” Jensen said in answer to the technician’s question, the same question he had repeatedly fielded over a three-hour supply of coffee and cakes. “The Shearborn was in pursuit of another suspect. Yes, that one got away, but his escape turned out to be fortunate. No Fleet scout would have entered this system if that chase hadn’t gone sour. Yes, it was risky to shoot out that cable, but the children were unharmed. Now, if you’ll excuse me? I’ve a promise to keep.” He hefted the gilt-papered bottle he had cadged for his pilot. An unwilling victim of regulations, Harris had been forced to remain on duty aboard the scout.

  The technician smiled and shook hands again. “You’re a brave young man, sir, and a pride to the Fleet. You’ve saved the Alliance more than you know by keeping those weapon prototypes from the Indies.”

  Jensen smiled back, raised the bottle apologetically, then dodged another wave of admirers. Any other time the lieutenant would have reveled in public adulation; but not here, not now. A most telling question remained unanswered, one detail left loose to rasp his nerves. MacKenzie James was nobody’s humanitarian. A criminal of his caliber was unlikely to act out of pity for a father’s little girls. Jensen dared not consider the incident finished until he was back at his post on the Shearborn and out of the Cassix system altogether. The fact that Harris could not share the celebration became his only excuse to slip away.